New Role

Time for change

After 4 years building out a team of systems and tooling engineers, I’m taking on a new role within the company. On July 14th, I will be transitioning to the Production Engineering (PE) org helping support a team that is responsible for several key areas of keeping the server fleet healthy.

What does this mean for me personally? Promotion? New car? shoe deal? No to all of those “perks”. Its actually a lateral move level wise. There are some extra compensation aspects to the role being part of the core engineering orgs of the company. But helping support a team that has some critical infrastructure under their per view is part of the appeal for me.

How we got here…

When I first started at Facebook, I was working in the data centers supporting the fleet both building out the server foot print and then being responsible for the care and feeding of the servers in the Altoona Data Center. 4 years ago, I took on the role of building out a team within Site Operations to work on the tooling helping fill gaps, fix bugs and help make the fleet healthier. This new role is that next step in the evolution. The key difference between system engineers and production engineers is that systems engineers do not own anything. PE does.

For my own career growth, there simply wasn’t any more growth in my current role. It was pretty clear during the performance time that I was doing great, but there wasn’t the opportunity to grow the role in the current environment within my org. Simply put, I was stuck.

So, this is part of the change that was needed. There are a lot of additional opportunities in the new role which is something I’m excited to see where it leads.

You are really changing jobs in this economy?!?

Heck yes! If anything, I think I’m making my position within the company more stable. And… I get the opportunity to support a team that has some solid players on it already and has the room for growth in the future.

Biggest change…

Besides the new org, which is a big change in and of itself. One of the biggest changes is going fully remote. I’ll have the opportunity to travel still and get into the old office a few times a month. But for the most part, I will be fully remote in the new role. This will have some challenges during the summer when the kiddos are out of school. But also some benefits of being able to see the big boss more and hopefully spend some additional times in the wood shop over the lunch hour.

I’m happy I’ve made it this far and I can’t wait to see where this journey takes me next!